Cliffside Park man sentenced to 28 years for raping 2 pre-teen girls

A Cliffside Park man was sentenced Friday to 28 years in prison for randomly breaking into a borough home and raping two pre-teen girls in their bedrooms.

“Serkan Seyrek was the monster that so many parents tell their children doesn’t exist,” Catherine Fantuzzi, an assistant Bergen County prosecutor said in Superior Court in Hackensack. “Apparently, monsters do exist.”

Seyrek apologized to his victims and to his own family. His attorney, Savyon Grant, asked for leniency, saying Seyrek was “a 22-year-old boy with an adolescent brain.”

His father, Ahmet Seyrek, tearfully asked Judge Liliana DeAvila-Silebi to consider another side of Seyrek – a boy who was diagnosed with cancer at the age of two and lost an eye after a surgery. He once asked his father when his eye was going to grow again.

Fitted with a prosthetic eye, he became an easy target for bullying and ridicule by his classmates throughout his childhood, the older Seyrek said.

“I told him, ‘You are strong. Show them’,” the father said.

Grant described Seyrek as a boy who seemed to have taken that advice. With support from a loving family, he lived a mostly law-abiding life, coached soccer in his community and helped his younger relatives learn English, she said.

But he also struggled with his flaws as he started drinking and using drugs at the age of 15, Grant said. In 2010, he crashed and totaled his car while driving drunk, she said.

“This is a very good individual who made a very big mistake,” Grant said.

If that had won any sympathy from Silebi, it was gone by the time Fantuzzi began to describe in detail the sexual assaults that Seyrek admitted to in court.

Even in a courtroom accustomed to stunning accounts of human depravity, this one left many in the audience with gaping mouths.

Seyrek admitted that after he returned home drunk from a party at Ramapo College on the night of Feb. 22, 2012, he began walking along Washington Avenue in his neighborhood, checking the doors of several homes until he found one that was unlocked.

Fantuzzi said Seyrek went inside and entered the bedroom of a 9-year-old girl who was sleeping. He ordered her to take her clothes off before having vaginal, anal and oral intercourse with her, Fantuzzi said.

Seyrek told the girl that he would kill her if she made a sound, and would kill her entire family if she told anyone, Fantuzzi said.

He then asked the girl how old her sister was, and when the girl wouldn’t tell him, he bit her in the face and in the back until the girl gave in and told him that her sister was 11, Fantuzzi said.

Seyrek then went into the sister’s bedroom, put a pillow to her face to silence her, and performed vaginal, anal and oral intercourse with her, Fantuzzi said.

The girls’ mother eventually woke up and went into the 11-year-old girl’s bedroom to find Seyrek raping her daughter, Fantuzzi said. The mother pulled Seyrek away from the girl and began struggling with him, and when Seyrek fought her off and ran out of the house, the mother ran after him briefly down the street before she returned home to be with her daughters, Fantuzzi said.

When the girls told her what happened to them, the mother “cried her eyes out like any mother would,” Fantuzzi said.

Even some of Seyrek’s relatives, who filled one side of the courtroom in his support, buried their heads in their hands as Fantuzzi spoke.

The mother sat on the other side of the courtroom and sobbed through most of the hearing.

“I lost my happy, innocent daughters,” she said in a letter Fantuzzi read in court on Friday.

When given the opportunity to speak, the mother said that she had to enroll her daughters in a different school because their classmates were always talking about the sexual assault, she said.

“They don’t want to see anyone,” she said. “They don’t want to walk on the streets because they are afraid. He has to pay for what he did.”

Silebi imposed the maximum sentence she could impose under a plea deal that Seyrek accepted in November. Seyrek must serve nearly 24 years before being eligible for parole. When he completes his term, he will be subject to lifelong parole and registration under Megan’s Law.